What Mortenson Got Wrong

Last September, when I was researching a profile of Rajeev Goyal, an American development worker, I asked what he thought about the book “Three Cups of Tea.” Rajeev and I were walking through the hills of eastern Nepal, where he had organized a number of projects over the past decade, including the construction of five schools. “Three Cups of Tea” is one of the bestselling books by Greg Mortenson, a mountaineer whose Central Asia Institute claims to have built or significantly supported more than a hundred and seventy schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Rajeev paused for a moment. “It seemed to be mostly about the author, about everything he accomplished,” he said slowly. “And that story is about quantity, about the number of schools built.” Rajeev said his own work had convinced him that construction projects are overvalued, and sometimes can even have a negative impact on a community. People might become dependant on outsiders, and corruption can become a problem. Building materials and methods may be inappropriate, especially if money comes from far away and there’s little oversight. Foreign-funded structures have a tendency to overuse cement, which can change local construction patterns in environmentally damaging ways, especially in dry parts of Central Asia. Rajeev believed that teacher training and other cultural factors often have more value. “A good teacher sitting under a tree can do more than a bad teacher in a new building,” he said. “That’s why I don’t want to do school construction anymore. It might have been a mistake. It’s a good instinct, as you want to help, but maybe it’s not the best thing.”

I asked about his impressions of Mortenson. “I kind of felt sorry for him,” Rajeev said. “That was my reaction reading the book. He must have low self-esteem.”

This conversation took place seven months ago—long before the recent episode of “60 Minutes” that accused Mortenson of fabricating key sections of his books and wildly exaggerating the impact of Central Asia Institute projects. Jon Krakauer’s “Three Cups of Deceit,” published online this week, is even more damning. He quotes many former C.A.I. employees who are scathing in their criticism of Mortenson, including board members who resigned in disgust. According to Krakauer, in 2009, C.A.I. spent 1.7 million dollars to promote Mortenson’s books, taking out full-page ads in publications like the New York Times, and chartering private planes for him to attend speaking events. The non-profit purchased tens of thousands of copies of “Three Cups of Tea” and “From Stones Into Schools” from commercial retailers, which meant that royalties would be paid to Mortenson, who doesn’t donate such proceeds to C.A.I. Krakauer quotes a memo from a lawyer at the firm Copilevitz & Canter, who examined C.A.I.’s tax return and warned that the I.R.S. could cite Mortenson for receiving excess benefit from a charity. The memo explains that as C.A.I. had been doing this for years, Mortenson “could face a total liability ranging from $7,868,746.31 … to $23,606,238.62.”

I didn’t realize how prescient Rajeev Goyal’s analysis was until I read Krakauer’s report. It’s clear that Mortenson is a deeply troubled individual—although at this point people may have difficulty feeling very sorry for him.

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For years, I’ve found it hard to talk about Mortenson’s books. They often come up in conversation, because I’m a former Peace Corps teacher who lived in Asia for more than a decade. And yet that experience made me wary of any simple narrative that involves an American helping people overseas. Like many volunteers, I often felt overwhelmed and ineffective; it took two years of diligent study just to gain a decent facility with the Chinese language. I was still making cultural mistakes up until the day I left. If anything, I felt most positive about the Peace Corps experience because my impact was limited—I left without building anything, or changing the culture, or revolutionizing classroom patterns in my school. I always viewed it as an exchange: there was some value to my teaching, and in the meantime I learned a great deal from my students, colleagues, and friends. It seemed a tiny part of an incremental, long-term process, as China engaged with the outside world. And the key element was that the Chinese remained in charge—it was up to them to improve their country.

I decided to profile Rajeev because I felt comfortable with his attitude toward development work, which had started during his own years in the Peace Corps. He was not a self-promoter; despite having organized an impressive water project in the village where he served, Rajeev’s story hadn’t found its way into the American press. He tended to be highly critical of his work, and he talked more about failures than successes. He often referred to key lessons he had learned from villagers. He had resisted the impulse to expand, because he recognized how hard it is to have a positive effect in even a small community. Most important, he had made a real commitment to Nepal. He had lived there for years, mostly at the village level, and he spoke the language fluently.

I’ve never seen evidence that Greg Mortenson exhibits these qualities. He’s the hero of his books, and he believes in scale, speed, and the constant need for more money and more construction. He shows no special knowledge of Pakistan or Afghanistan. In fact, he spends very little time in Central Asia, as Krakauer’s report illustrates. Mortenson refused to be interviewed by either Krakauer or “60 Minutes,” and as of yet he has made few responses to the allegations. But even his limited statements have been telling. Outside magazine asked Mortenson whether he had fabricated the dramatic opening episode of “Three Cups of Tea,” citing the testimony of both American climbing partners and local villagers, who said that Mortenson had not been there during the period he described. Mortenson blamed any confusion on the local culture, explaining, “It’s worth noting that in the Balti language of northeast Pakistan, there is little or no emphasis on tenses, and ‘now’ can mean a few minutes, weeks, or even a whole season. The Balti find westerners’ emphasis on time confusing.”

I know nothing about the Balti language, but I recognize the tone of Mortenson’s statement. It’s the kind of simplified generalization that tends to be made by an individual with a shallow understanding of a language and a culture. Chinese also has no past tense; does this mean that the people don’t understand time? Or that history is unimportant, or that they speak of the past without accuracy? Such analysis is disrespectful; it’s a way of exoticizing and infantilizing a foreign culture. In this case it also seems highly evasive.

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Another reason I’ve always had trouble talking about Mortenson’s books is that it’s hard to give an alternative for people who feel the need to act. Even before the reports of C.A.I.’s mismanagement, I saw little value in this model of development. It’s centered around a foreigner, and the foreigner has no special expertise in either education or Central Asia. Even a balanced and reasonable individual is likely to fail in this situation. Mostly, I don’t believe that problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan stem from a lack of money or a lack of school buildings. There are deep-rooted cultural issues, as there are in any part of the developing world, where obstacles tend to be complicated and localized. Contact is the most critical starting point—it helps to have foreigners living in and learning about these places, just as it helps to have Central Asians studying abroad. As knowledge deepens, the people involved are more likely to find solutions to local problems. But most folks who read “Three Cups of Tea” are not interested in living in northwestern Pakistan and learning how to speak Pashto. They want to donate money from a distance, and they want to be part of something that shows tangible, physical results, like a new school building.

In recent days, some have defended Mortenson by noting that a number of C.A.I. schools were built and are still functioning, and they claim this is better than nothing at all. But there’s no reason to set the bar so low. One of the main problems with N.G.O.s is a lack of accountability, because donors and journalists tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m bothered by the inaccuracies in Mortenson’s books, especially because there’s a pattern of disrespect for local culture. The worst is his claim that he was kidnapped by the Taliban, which now appears to be a twisted version of a trip in which he was actually hosted by generous villagers. I hope that Viking, his publisher, responds to these allegations in some meaningful way. But I find it more troubling that countless journalists have profiled Mortenson in strictly hagiographic terms. This is partly because they’ve taken quick tours of model schools; as any teacher will tell you, a visitor doesn’t learn much from a walk-through and a few translated conversations with hand-picked students. Krakauer didn’t have to do much digging to find evidence of mismanagement at C.A.I., where many former employees spoke openly and critically. (“Greg regards CAI as his personal ATM,” said a former treasurer for the organization.) In 2002, four board members resigned, but it took nearly a decade for their complaints to become public.

A number of years ago, a wealthy friend of mine considered investing in Bernie Madoff’s hedge fund. But his family’s policy is that they won’t invest in any company until they speak to a number of former employees. They talked with people who had left Madoff’s Ascot Partners, and they concluded that something didn’t feel right, so they put their money elsewhere. When I heard this story, it reminded me that any good journalist should follow this strategy when he’s writing about a company. And after the revelations of the past week, I’ll be sure to apply the same standard to any N.G.O.

Photograph courtesy Central Asia Institute.

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